Professional video at amateur price (Sony Handycam HDR-SR12E)

Member Name: nickn5

Product:	Sony Handycam HDR-SR12E
Date:	26/07/09 (69 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Compact, easy to use, fantastic results

Disadvantages: Editing video, price

This digital video camera was probably the most expensive photographic purchase I have ever made, but I have never regretted it. I paid about £900 for it at the time (over a year ago).

For starters it has a massive 120GB hard drive built-in. Now I've heard lots of people fret and worry about hard drive camcorders, but let me tell you, the one in here is robust. Very robust. It uses the same cushioning that laptop computers use, plus a bit, and it's survived all the bad treatment I've accidentally dished out. The capacity is superb - it means even on the ultra-highest quality at full high definition, you can still get 12 hours of video, continuous. And with a high capacity battery, readily available online, you get 4-6 hours there too.

Secondly, it has a 'has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed' TFT monitoring screen, which blew me away the first time I used it, crisp, sharp, colourful, and it's a touch-screen too. Only downside is, it gets a bit smudgy and messy from touching it. You can of course buy screen protectors quite easily from various online retailers.

Thirdly, it feels great in the hands, and is not all that heavy at all. I use the side strap to put my hand through, and I can reach the power switch with my thumb (and the REC start/stop button) and the zoom with my finger, easily. The 'instant photo' button is just to the back of the zoom, so I've found no problem in using that while videoing.

Fourthly, the monitor (LCD) is optional, if you want to save battery life, you have the choice of just using the small but still colourful viewfinder monitor, for a more discreet videoing look. By not using the TFT monitor you do of course lose the ability to enter commands and customise things via the touchscreen.

Fifthly, it picks up sounds brilliantly. It officially uses several directions on its top microphone to give a Dolby Digital 5.1 illusion on playback, and actually it works very well.

Sixthly, it turns on and off pretty quickly, and if you really want fast access, there is a facility to put it on Standby, or 'Quick On' as Sony call it.

Seventhly, you can stick a Memory Stick Pro Duo into it to save all your photos to, freeing up hard drive space for video and enabling much easier transferring to the computer. You can choose whether to save pictures, video, or both to the Memory Stick. I'd recommend just staying with still pictures as video files are enormous.

Eighthly, nightshot mode - enables night time shooting of video with a nifty infra-red kind of look (in green). This has limited usefulness but it's nice to have the feature available.

Ninthly, the Optical Image Stabilisation is absolutely incredible, I just still cannot believe how well it works, and with no loss of image quality either. You really can get away without a tripod for this camera, and I very often have.

Lastly, the menu system and screen layout is really very simple to use and well laid out, so much so that the instruction book I have mislaid but don't really care too much!

After all that, any negatives? Well yes, just a couple:

First, the high capacity battery is great for extending video time, but it gets horribly in the way if you do want to use the built-in viewfinder and not the swivelling TFT screen, you would need eyes on stalks to be able to overcome that situation.

Secondly, because the video it produces is High Definition and BIG files, the format it saves in (M2TS) is uneditable unless you have something like a Quad-Core Processor PC, and the right software which is hard to find. You can watch them easily enough, but editing is still rather a problem.

Overall though, once my bank account had recovered, I was absolutely delighted with this camcorder, and still am. Being a Sony product, it should be reliable and work well, and mine certainly does.

Summary: Hard to find much fault with this one

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